I've made no progress on this, so let's try again. My dynamic
PDF is working perfectly with MSIE 4, 5, and 6, but I'm still
having problems with Netscape (ver 4 and 6) and the Acrobat
(ver 4 and 5) plugin. I've tried this on various client machines.
With both NS4 and NS6, I just get a blank screen when I request
my dynamic PDF. They don't even show the Acrobat toolbar. The
similarities end there.
In NS4, the first request does not launch the AcroRd32.exe
process. In fact, it fails to read the entire output of the
servlet and Tomcat (4.0.3) spits out a Broken Pipe exception
to the logs. If I hit "Reload", however, I get my PDF and the
plugin works. According to the Apache logs, the first unsucessful
request returns 6144 of 21212 bytes before the broken pipe. On
the "Reload", the Apache log shows TWO requests returning the
full 21212 bytes and Netscape displays it in the plugin.
In NS6, the first request DOES launch the plugin executable, but
that's as far as it gets. "Reload" doesn't help. My Apache server
reports the correct number of bytes for the full PDF request, so the
data seems to be getting to the browser. No exceptions are thrown
by Tomcat.
In both NS4 and NS6, it works if I configure Acrobat to be launched
as an external application instead of a plugin. But it is not a
viable option to impose that configuration on our customers.
I use a servlet mapping that sends requests for xxx.pdf to my
servlet, thus the browser sees a ".pdf" filename. I also use
setContentType("application/pdf"). There are known problems
with MSIE and unknown ContentLength with PDF so I create the
PDF in a ByteArrayOutputStream so I can know and set the
ContentLength before writing to response.getOutputStream().
To take the dynamic nature of the PDF out of the equation, I was
able to reproduce these problems --sometimes-- when serving static
PDF files via Tomcat.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Larsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 1:44 PM
Subject: Problems serving PDF to Netscape browsers
> I'm running out of hair to pull out here...
>
> My ultimate goal is to serve dynamically generated
> PDF documents generated with iText. I've got it working
> just fine with MSIE. However, I was just getting blank
> pages with Netscape (and it wasn't even showing the toolbar
> for Acrobat). With NS6 I could at least see that it started
> an AcroRd32.exe process, but NS4 didn't even get that far.
>
> So, I did some tests to rule out some variables. I grabbed
> a handful of pre-generated PDF files and stuck them on
> my Apache 1.3.23 server. All browsers could display the
> PDFs just fine. Then I set up Tomcat 4.0.3 to server the
> same files directly without going through Apache. MSIE worked,
> but both NS browsers gave a blank page with no Acrobat plugin
> toolbar. Again NS6 managed to start an Acrobat process, NS4
> didn't.
>
> My production environment is Apache 1.3.23 and Tomcat 4.0.3
> connected with mod_jk.
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
